Black Coffee
by La Editor
Summary: They take what they can get. Rebecca, Billy, and the corpse in the corner of the room.


.

He isn't a law-abiding type of guy – well, hell, he _was _until they pulled his hands in the cuffs for a crime he didn't commit, pushed into a story not his own – but Billy has his own set of rules.

He's had a lot of time to think. Solitary confinement was a bitch, and there was nothing to do but sit and watch the bugs on the walls. You feel like you start to go a bit crazy after a while, and the only thing you really have in that six-by-seven hell is what's up in your head, and he has his own ideas of how things go and he's labeled them, nice and neat in a box stacked in the attic of his brain. He isn't crazy – just needed something to keep him goddamn _sane_—

Lately, he's been thinking on the ideas that focus on this nifty little thing called _self-preservation_. Rule number three on Billy's List of Life: know what the hell you're doing and where the hell you are. This one he came up with in the Marines, usually when he got so messed up from drinking with the guys he couldn't tell left from up and if he got caught he'd be scrubbing toilets for the next week with his toothbrush. It works pretty well in all walks of life, he figures, even if it can be pretty unforgiving. That's part of being a man, now, isn't it? Taking the goddamn responsibility for just knowing what's going on.

He never thinks much past that part for that rule.

Rule number two, never be the example.

It's self-explanatory and has saved his butt enough times, but this one is falling off the wagon, right along with rule number one.

Rule of self-preservation number one (this one is for all the should-haves and what-ifs: Billy usually doesn't agonize, but he's killed himself over it, only crime being fucking _bad luck _and probably karma for all the hearts he's broken, because Billy was a different guy when his head was fuzzy from buzz cuts and his uniforms were ironed): trust yourself. Nobody else.

This worked fine for him in prison, the couple of times he was around other guys and especially the one time they wanted to bust out. He almost made it, too, just because he stuck to the top three – also because the guards were drunk as all hell – but the golden number one rule saved his ass when they woke up, because if he had trusted the other jerks he would have been on death row a hell of a lot sooner than now.

Well, not right now. Not really.

Right now – well, maybe death row was a good way to put it. Stuck in a nightmare with a princess, running out of options and ammo.

In the past five minutes: leeches and leeches, too many to shoot down until they got to a safe spot to snipe from the top of a staircase. It killed the bugs but in turn attracted _more fucking monkeys_. It's like the goddamn things multiply like rabbits. Or caterpillars, or something. They multiply like jackasses.

He and princess had to run and shoot behind their shoulders to gain some ground, but this room they've just found themselves in is pretty lucky – actually, backtrack and scratch that because that's just _too_ ironic and he's too pissed off at luck to be able to make cracks like that – in that it's a good resting stop as Rebecca double-checks the hallway and quietly shuts the door. Her breathing is still quick, still a little uneven, stance still a little tense. She's just a rookie.

But she's one hell of a rookie, too. This brings Billy back to the present, where he has broken his number one rule. Thank you, _Princess-Officer Chambers_. A moaning distracts him temporarily, from his left.

"I want a beer," he announces as he blasts open the skull of the animated corpse. He tries not to look at the face of it, keeping his eyes on the torso, the arms, the legs, anything but the face while he waits to see if it moves again from where it fell behind a desk. It doesn't, and he looks around, figuring the room they're in – some sort of mini-library or study, not too small but not way big – is safe enough, and crouches down to catch his breath.

"This isn't the best place to get drunk, if you haven't noticed," Rebecca's voice says absently next to him as she sits down. He snorts.

"No shit, cupcake. Naw, I'm gonna find a diner, somewhere. Nice diner where everyone minds their own business. Beer and a hamburger."

He tries to visualize that diner and pretends, quiet and to himself, that there is no blood on the floors or mold on the walls. He almost sees the fantasy through the landscape painting that is hanging on the wall across from them. It's a bit dirty and looks like the paint could be rotting, if that were possible, but its recognizable and not bad to look at.

"A nice diner? What's your vision of _nice_?" She's all sass and smiles. She's like that, and Billy sort of likes it. Her head rests on her knees, and she isn't smiling now as she watches him unblinkingly.

"White tiles, kinda dusty but pretty well kept… and old walls, half white and half faded blue. Blue on the bottom."

"Dusty tiles? That isn't nice."

"Sure it is," Billy says easily, too tired to argue and too worn out to close himself off. He'll be back and ready to go as soon as he stands up, he thinks, but he doesn't feel like it just yet because he remembers how much he misses having anyone to talk to. He's probably doing this to keep himself sane. "Sure it is, it's just dusty because… outside the diner there's a small desert town."

Rebecca's lips quirk, and she closes her eyes for a moment.

"And… the customers track dirt in on it all the time, so the workers just gave up and only sweep every Tuesday," she says.

"Obviously," Billy says and reclines from his haunches to sit on his ass, which he feels has not deserved such a well-earned break since – back then and before – nevermind. "It'd be a dumb old diner that was probably made in the fifties or something. But it'd still be nice."

"You could order a malt."

"You could, but I'd order a beer and a hamburger." He wouldn't even look at the menu, just tell the waitress – it'd be a waitress, a pretty young blonde with red lipstick and a southern drawl with bubble-gum – just say, a fucking beer and hamburger, _please. _Because nobody would give a damn about language or anything, she'd just smack her gum and write it down and take the menu and go off to tell the chef.

"Sitting at the bar or in a booth?" Rebecca is smiling now with half-lidded eyes, sort of dopey and embarrassing and endearing and kind of pretty. She slowly unfurls from the fetal position and her body visibly relaxes.

"Bar. On a stool with rusty metal legs and old leather."

"The leather would be sort of maroonish purple-pink-red," Rebecca supplies. She rubs her eyes. "And… it'd squeak when you move it. It would be kind of irritating until you get used to it." And then it'd be familiar, Billy thinks. Rebecca is more of a booth girl, he decides. Probably never sat up at the bar of a food joint in her life.

They alternate looking at their hands and each other, but mostly they look at the landscape painting. It's sort of nice, with painted grass and a blue sky and dirt and a couple of small houses. It's sort of moldy, but it's nice all the same and reminds him of something he can't place, yellowed memories from a childhood he hardly remembers.

"It'd smell like grease. Like greasy fries, meat and black coffee." He pretends he can smell it with a shallow breath, but then Rebecca inhales deeply and he thinks it's okay to pretend in the open, for now. They're fucking nuts and fucking kids again, like they've never handled guns. Maybe he's eighteen and she's fifteen and they just got away from the teacher in charge of detention, hiding in an empty classroom and taking a break. She isn't the type, though. Rebecca was probably the student who picked the front seat every class. Gals like that always got on his nerves, and they'd never be caught dead in anything resembling trouble, but she would probably get pulled into it. She'd still be sitting with him all the same, he figures.

"It'd be a kind of boring plump middle-aged woman taking orders," Rebecca decides, and he looks over in surprise. "With… bright red hair," she fumbles with words to push them out as she thinks: keeping the words coming means keeping it alive. Keeps the coffee in his lungs and the scuffed floors under his boots, keeps everything sane for a while. He'd like to keep his head screwed on right-side up, if that's alright with Umbrella, _thank-you-very-fucking-much_. "Bright red hair and old-lady make-up and giant earrings. Chewing bubble-gum."

"Nah, you got it all wrong, you kidding? It'd be a hot young blonde. With legs." He leans back on one elbow, focusing on the grass in the picture.

"I'm pretty sure anyone who'd work there would have legs."

She's making fun of him, and Billy snorts. "Geez. Okay, Queenie. Either way, she would have bubble-gum and an accent."

"Texan."

"You got it, babycakes." He likes how miffed she gets whenever he calls her by a pet-name, and is almost disappointed when she doesn't shoot any snarky comments back. "There'd be an old jukebox, too."

"With those turn knobs and little flaps inside the glass. The songs would be from the decades and decades ago, too. Nobody would actually use it."

"The workers would. When they're cleaning up. But during the day, yeah. They'd just have radio and the smallest damn TV you'd ever seen set up on the bar so they could watch primetime sports."

Rebecca rubs her face with her forearm. "More than anything, it'd be very sunny," she tells him, herself, the room, and the corpse half behind the desk that neither of them are looking at.

"You got it, princess. So sunny you'd burn your eyes right outta their sockets just looking." Something about this starts her up, because she holds her mouth over her hand as she giggles. Surprisingly, a smile threatens his own face and he snorts with laughter, too, and they heave with suppressed mirth together, hands over mouths, fists stuffed in to keep it quiet because they aren't simultaneously fucking nuts _and_ stupid, and it feels good. The best part and the worst part is probably that it doesn't make any sense at all. And that's alright.

"I wonder where that place is," the princess – girl – rookie – Rebecca finally wonders aloud, again leaning her head against her knees loosely, watching him. Billy chances a glance at her, the portrait, back to her.

"It's on the other side of the mansion," he tells her, as well as himself, and the make-believe vanishes except for this. They're grown up again, and he wasn't eighteen when she was fifteen, half a lifetime ago for him and only a few years for her – the thought is strange and unwelcome as her clear eyes anchor him to the now – and he never dragged her into running from detention, and they know how to handle guns because they're used to it, but maybe at that place, right on the other side, maybe—

This is stupid, he thinks. It's so stupid that it's brilliant, because they need it.

"Right on the other side," Rebecca finally echoes. "I'm going to get a malt and french fries." She starts to stand up.

"We'll sit at the bar and watch football," Billy says stupidly, and they grin at each other like idiots for a moment. He stands up as well, and there's nothing more to do than stare at the picture until they remember themselves and pull their guns out to leave, back to the nightmare.

As they go, Billy shuts the door behind them.

.


End file.
